My issue with recipe timings is that even if you cook things for as long as it says, the overall time to cook the recipe is always very "optimistic". I assume the issue is some combination of marketing and the fact that the test cook was done by a professional chef who can dice 10 onions in a minute.

Ingredient prep is intentionally left out of recipe timings. In theory, this lets everybody adapt the recipe timing to themselves, because only you know if you can chop two onions in three minutes or thirty seconds, but as with the Doomsday Device in Doctor Strangelove, it's worse than useless if nobody knows about it. "Why didn't you tell the world?"

I very much doubt that most recipe timings actually involve a timed test cook at all. They're just guesstimates.

I imagine it’s done that way because people don’t necessarily know what to look for when cooking something. If some one doesn’t know how to cook steak, you can’t tell them “cook till medium rare”. So we start trying to come up with proxies.

That’s to caramelise onions. Cooking onions through takes a few minutes. Plenty of instances where you don’t want to caramelise onions.

Not really caramelise is more like 40 minutes. You do need at the very minimum 15 minutes to cook onions, 20 to 25 to “brown” them.

> people would say you need to cook onions for 10 minutes, while onions take close to 25 minutes to be cooked

It's up to recipe author to define what they cook and how. If you think 25 min is better, fork it.

Or report the bug, which should probably have another name in this context.

The main problem for me (who am interested in cooking, as well as somewhat au fait with version control) is that at this point in my life, I could not for the life of me write down a recipe for almost anything that I cook, because it is all based on "enough" and "to taste", with cooking times being in the "well, you look at the ingredients and a cooking schedule effortlessly forms in your mind" (none, by the way, based on actual time), allowing me to do things like cooking things in the oven and three or four pots on the stove, and have everything ready at the same time, by staggering the start times.

And I literally cannot tell you how I do it, because at this point, I don't know. I do know how I got there, though. Cooking, lots of it, at various scales and in variously equipped kitchens.

Scale-wise, I have cooked for 1. And on the upper end, I have cooked for about 50.

How do we specify "cook until translucent"?

I believe the term is usually "Sweat the onion"

Just another reason to allow easy forking ;-)